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But Does It Look Real? Computer Imagery Can Fall Flat with Moviegoers Top Stories
The movie industry's ever-changing formula for ever higher box-office returns is translating into ever more computer-generated imagery, known as CGI. The Wachowski brothers reportedly spent $100 million on CGI alone for "The Matrix Reloaded" and this fall's finale of the "Matrix" trilogy, "The Matrix Revolutions."
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Real or not, there's not much anymore that Hollywood won't try.
In "Bad Boys II," Martin Lawrence pokes his noggin out the passenger window of a speeding Ferrari and grimaces as an airborne car barely misses his head. In "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines,'' metal robot Kristanna Loken's face, stuck on a magnetic particle accelerator, starts to break apart and melt. And in Hollywood's latest action movie, the video-game-savvy kids of "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" hop surfboards made of rock to glide across flowing molten lava.
The movie industry's ever-changing formula for ever higher box-office returns is translating into ever more computer-generated imagery, known as CGI. It's a process that now dominates action and science fiction movies, genres fueled by young male moviegoers who can fixate on a franchise such as "Star Wars" or "The Lord of the Rings" and go see the movie numerous times, generating hundreds of millions of dollars at box offices worldwide.
For summer 2003, CGI means that the incredibly green Incredible Hulk can appear to be 15 feet tall in Ang Lee's "The Hulk" and that the kick-butt gals of "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" can defy gravity with impossible martial arts leaps. The Wachowski brothers reportedly spent $100 million on CGI alone for "The Matrix Reloaded" and this fall's finale of the ''Matrix" trilogy, "The Matrix Revolutions."
For many moviegoers, though, CGI can be overused or misused and become a turnoff. With some films, including "The Hulk" and "Charlie's Angels," movie lovers are chanting the same mantra: "It doesn't look real."
In the much-discussed "Burly Brawl" in "The Matrix Reloaded," actor Keanu Reeves suddenly turns into a computerized character to fight 100 attacking Agent Smiths.
"It was so glaringly obvious it was not real people," says Nick Nunziata, 31, who runs the Alpharetta-based Web site www.chud.com (Cinematic Happenings Under Development). "This 'Matrix' became like a cartoon."
Apparently Nunziata wasn't the only moviegoer who didn't buy it. "Reloaded" opened in early May, making more than $135 million in four days. But in the more than two months since, it has yet to break $300 million in U.S. theaters. Now, "Reloaded," the most ballyhooed and anticipated movie of summer 2003, has been surpassed at the box office by "Finding Nemo."
Don't think the movie industry hasn't noticed.
"Maybe the 'Matrix' guys just ran out of time on the effects," says director Robert Rodriguez, 35, whose "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" opened nationwide Friday. "They were trying to push the envelope on what has been done. But as in the Burly Brawl, everyone saw Keanu's black coat suddenly go flat. It looked too much like a video game."
Computer-generated imagery has been used in movies for more than two decades. In 1982, Disney's "Tron," a forward-thinking film about guys caught inside a computer game, focused attention on CGI. A decade later, moviegoers gasped when Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" introduced dinosaurs that many thought looked as if they could be the real thing.
"When you see a lot of CGI effects these days, they look fake because everybody knows about CGI now," says Carl Cunningham, 31, of Acworth, who runs the Web site www.cinemawatch.net. DVDs are packed with extras explaining how special effects are done, and there are countless "behind the scenes" featurettes on television lifting the veil on the mysteries of moviemaking.
"When you saw the dinos in 'Jurassic Park,' your jaws hit the floor,'' Cunningham says. ''That kind of advanced CGI hadn't been seen before. Now we are more informed. Two guys in a garage can make CGI as good as in the movies."
And when audiences see CGI they think doesn't work, they get mad. As with Sean Connery's "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," which includes a speeding-car scene with crashes and maneuvers that many moviegoers say look anything but real.
"They were so careless," says Nunziata of www.chud.com. "It's like the filmmakers hopped into a time machine and went back 10 years and used old CGI. They just threw it up there."
Some see special effects as Hollywood's easy crutch.
"CGI has gotten a little out of control," says Richard Kelly, the 28-year-old director of the innovative cult hit "Donnie Darko," an enigmatic time-travel movie that employs small moments of CGI in its bizarre story involving a high school genius. "Clearly CGI was necessary to create 'The Hulk.' You can't do it any other way. Just like in 'Donnie Darko' where I had liquid spheres coming out of people's chests and the time portal. You can't do those any other way. But there are other places where filmmakers are using CGI out of laziness or just because it's there. It can become empty spectacle."
He wonders how the 1978 art-film milestone "Days of Heaven," directed by Terrence Malick, might get made today.
"There's that wonderful scene with the wheat fields burning and the locusts swarming where Malick actually did those things," Kelly says. "Now somebody would say, 'Let's just put CGI fire there so we don't have to light it on fire. Let's throw the locusts in digitally.' But if you can really do it [without CGI], you should do it. Otherwise, it's going to have an artificial quality to it."
But there are many times when movie studios get it right.
"The CGI work in 'Pirates of the Caribbean' is seamless," says Micah Robinson, 29, of Marietta, an avid filmgoer who estimates that he sees 85 percent to 90 percent of the movies released each year. "Rather than separate the skeleton creatures from their human selves and have some sort of grand transformation, the filmmakers absolutely integrated everything. You had random scenes where beams of moonlight would partially reveal the pirates as skeletons. It was done so naturally and not made as part of any spectacle. I would say that was very creative, and it seemed natural."
As a Hollywood director, Rodriguez has taken it upon himself to learn all facets of filmmaking, including writing, editing, orchestrating music and CGI. He's the visual effects supervisor on "Spy Kids 3-D" as well as director.
"The more the moviemaker is involved and knows how it works, the less he's owing to technicians," Rodriguez says. "Sometimes I find that if I just change the shot a little bit, it will be convincing."
What bothers many is that CGI is often used at the expense of story. "Bad Boys II," for example, is an over-the-top, gory action movie in which special effects are ratcheted up, often to mask deficiencies in the storytelling.
This summer's box-office leader, "Finding Nemo," is from Pixar, a CGI-animation studio that, with its "Toy Story" movies and "Monsters, Inc.," established a solid reputation as a company that puts story ahead of even its own impressive computerized special effects.
"They are like Oz hiding behind the wall," Nunziata declares. "They have a grasp nobody else has."
Andrew Stanton, 37, the writer-director of the fully CGI "Finding Nemo," says story is always king.
"I had such a satisfying moment a month ago when my 10-year-old son and his friend were bored," he says. He played for them "The Bridge on the River Kwai," the slow-moving 1957 psychological drama starring Alec Guinness as a World War II prisoner in Asia and culminating in the dynamiting of a prisoner-built bridge that would aid the Japanese.
"It gave me such hope," Stanton says. "In this day of 'Matrix' this and 'Terminator' that, they were enthralled. You think it's all about making the effects flashy, and then you see kids riveted by the simple collapse of a bridge. It's all about context and placement in the story."
One perfect modern-day marriage of story and effects might well be Gollum, the CGI character in director Peter Jackson's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers." Gollum is a combination of computer effects and "motion capturing," a process that integrates the movements of actor Andy Serkis into the character.
Film fan Robinson says that Jackson "put the soul and heart and motion in that character when it could have become a stock character with a lisp. But he completely brushed all that aside and brought that character to life in a way that is the centerpiece of those films. Peter Jackson looked at what could have been an average creature and he took it up so many more levels."
Stanton says the success of Gollum goes beyond CGI "duct tape and wire" into a kind of directorial sorcery.
"You have to give credit to Peter Jackson in knowing which shots --- whether from animation or one involving more motion capturing --- to use'' at any given moment, Stanton says.
Jackson's success with his "Rings" trilogy, which will conclude with "The Return of the King" in December, has many anticipating the director's next project: a remake of the 1933 classic "King Kong," a milestone in stop-motion animation. Jackson will employ modern effects in his version, slated for 2005.
"There is a lot of apprehension about it, a fear that he's touching something that is considered holy," says Cunningham of www.cinemawatch.net.
But there is also a good deal of trust. "I get excited how much more realistic and how much more seamless 'King Kong' can be done now," Robinson says. "Peter Jackson is someone who will look at a creature like that and bring out the emotion and how it connects to the world."
What happens too often in Hollywood, many say, is the opposite approach.
"You never see suits pushing to see films upped in the way of characterization," Robinson says. "The studio is going to take one look at the cut of your film and say, 'We are opening against X, Y and Z, and those are going to be over the top with special effects.'
"That's the one thing the studio will sign off on. In their minds, it's the only thing that guarantees the box office. The bigger the effects, the bigger haul you get."
But what Hollywood needs to realize, Cunningham maintains, is that "the wow factor is gone" for CGI. When filmmakers make car chases like "League's" that defy the laws of physics, he says, live-action movies become cartoons.
"It's like the anvil dropping on the cartoon character. That's when you lose the audience."
Copyright 2003 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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